2. Contact Info

3. Dealer Selection

“I know it sounds like ‘The dog ate my homework,’ but the car ate my ticket.” I said to the man seated inside the little booth at LAX’s terminal one parking structure. Five minutes earlier I’d parked the CTS-V Wagon so I could run to Southwest’s baggage claim and fetch my mother and her 97-pound suitcase. “Baby,” I said to my wife, who was staying behind in the Caddy with the dogs, “I’m leaving the parking ticket right here.”

“Right here” turned out to be a really, really bad place to leave the ticket. “Right here” was standing up on the CTS-V’s pop-up nav screen. I’ve spent some time detailing my dissatisfaction Cadillac‘s navigation solution. One nit I haven’t picked is that it goes up and down. My initial misgiving was, “Boy, when that breaks I hope it’s in the raised position.” My new irritant is that when you turn off the mighty CTS-V, the screen lowers itself and swallows parking tickets whole!

That’s right. I turned the car off and the little ticket is now living behind the dashboard. At first I just hollered at my wife, “Where’s the ticket!? I left it right here.” But then I noticed, to my horror, that the nav screen was down. The car ate it. And I knew what that meant. $30 for five minutes of parking and one lost ticket. “It’s the holidays,” my lovingly naive mother said. “Maybe he’ll just let us out.” To save you the suspense, that’s not what happened. And after checking my credit card online, the parking garage actually charged me $32 — there’s a totally hidden $2 service fee for using a credit card. Cadillac’s upcoming CUE in-car navigation and entertainment system needs to be here now, more than ever.

One other little nag. Every few thousand miles, the tire pressure monitoring system alerts me to the fact that the right rear tire is completely flat. 0 psi, literally. Of course, this has never once been the case. To my knowledge, this has occurred four times. I actually bothered to check the pressure two of those four times and the right rear tire held the exact same amount of air as the left rear tire. Here’s the thing, though: turn the CTS-V off overnight and the next morning, the TPMS thinks the right rear tire is fully inflated. Obviously the sensor’s bad. But the problem is so intermittent that I keep forgetting to tell the dealer when I bring it in for service.

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